ハムハムイングリッシュ2024年10月号のインタビューを文字起しした原稿です。
（10月6日ラジオ成田から放送、10月13日805たんばから放送）
リスニングの参考にしてください。
—パート1—————————————————————————————————-
Very good morning. Keith-san, And would you please introduce yourself, your callsign, your name and your residence in the United States, please?
My name is Keith HOWELL. My callsign is KE4KDY in the United States. I live in Virginia Beach. I’m retired now, but while I was working, I did work with the US Navy, but I am retired.
But to be clear, I guess, my association with Guantanamo Bay was as a civilian only as a guest. Nothing to do with work or anything. I was just a guest. In Guantanamo Bay, You have to be invited by someone who in the command there that knows you and trusts you because Guantanamo Bay is a navy base first. It is not, that’s the mission there is the Navy first, amateur radio is lay down the list of importance to the base. But the club station is there, or at least it was there, the last time I was there.
—パート2—————————————————————————————————-
You want to know about my station first
Yeah.
Ok. I have a YAESU FTDX101MP is what I use. I have a tower that’s a crank up tower that’s about 14m, cranks up to about 14m.
I have a antenna I have is more familiar to Japan as the Force 12, but it’s actually called the six BA. It’s a six band antenna. Very big one, 22 foot boom. It’s a monster. It’s really big and it has, like I say, six bands that are actually has 6m plus 40m beam and it works very, very well. It’s very well built and it’s very heavy.
It’s a very difficult to crow up or to maintain it.
It’s a challenge getting it down for me, I’ve had to take it down a couple of times, but it’s works really, really good. It’s very well built and so far it stands do withstands the weather. And I pretty much have my station like I want it right now. The MP is probably the last radio that I’ll buy and my backup radio is a YAESU FTDX5000MP. So that’s my backup radio in case something happens to the 101.
My shack is a mess. I have a lot of stuff in there. That I need to, have more stuff I probably need to, that I don’t use that I just need to sell or get rid of or something, you know.
—パート3—————————————————————————————————-
And I enjoy it for Guantanamo Bay, like I said before, you have to be invited down there. You have to have a sponsor. There is a club shack down there. my friend, Bill was W4WV in the US. he was pretty much instrumental in getting a lot of the new antennas down there. You met, Bill, you know, Bill.
Yeah,
Bill over the years has been able to get antennas down there and put up in the air for the club to use. The club station is, it is actually fair size room is actually two rooms and I think it’s two rooms. there’s a room in the back with a couch or a settee in the house. And place a workbench to do repairs. The front part has three operating stations. There’s three individual stations in there.
So the infrastructure is there, the antennas are up, the coax is there everything, is there, the operator that’s invited down there brings his own, his own radio, his own tuners, his own laptop for logging his power supplies, all the things that he needs to basically turn his radio on and off and use it.
Each station, three stations that the infrastructure.
—パート4—————————————————————————————————-
Yeah, there’s, I don’t know if there’s probably like 9 or 10 different antennas. I forgot now, but it’s about 9 or 10 different antennas. There’s a vertical, there’s a three element Trib bander, up there, there’s a force 12 antenna up there as well. Many antennas and there’s a patching system to where if you’re sitting at station one and you want to use the force 12 antenna you can take and patch your radio to a patch panel that’s connected to that. Ok. So that’s pretty much how it works. The other thing that you have to bring with you is filters. So all three of us have to be working on different bands. If there’s, if there’s three people down there working, operating, , you have to have bandpass filters. So if I’m on 20m at station one, I have to have my 20 m bandpass filter in place. If somebody’s working 15m sitting next to me, they have to have their, exactly to keep from interfering with each other and so forth. So that’s because when you have those 3 stations operating at the same time and that close proximity, you have to have filters. So that’s important.
—パート5—————————————————————————————————-
but all in all, you know, once you’re hooked up and, and connect it up to your antenna, you call CQ and hopefully somebody hears you and you just make a QSOs. I’ve had since with my three trips I’ve made, I think I’m at 4000, over 4000 QSOs. And for the three years that I’ve been that I was, yes. But I’ve only when I went down there, I was only down there for seven days, for a week. So, couple days, seven days. Yeah. So, but we would not operate all night long, like some expeditions do. We would come on the air probably at 7a.m., 0700 in the morning Guantanamo Bay time. And we would operate till probably 10 or 11 at night. And then we would go back to our rooms and sleep and then we’d do it all again the next day.
the morning, seven to the evening, the night, the very long time and at the time that just as sleep.
Yeah, exactly.
—パート6—————————————————————————————————-
Now, during the right around right around 1800 local time in Guantanamo Bay is the opening window for Japan. So usually at six, right after a week, come back from dinner, we would, or at least I would when I was operating would be exclusively JA only JA and my friend Massa, JE1LET would get everybody together on the band and he everybody would stand by and then he would call the next person and They would call me and I and that’s kind of how that worked.
so that’s how I met my friend Masa, I talked to him on the radio for four years before I finally got to meet him in 2018. Same day I met you. So, yeah, we all went to Bill and I went to Japan in 2018, came here for the hamfair at the Tokyo big site. And we met Joe, you.
yes.
at that point on, I’ve been here, this is my third trip to the Tokyo Hamfair and each time I meet new people. So it’s been a thrill and a lot of fun to come out here for that. And I will, so far I’m gonna try to come again next year. I will try. Yeah. As long as my health holds up. Yeah.
—パート7—————————————————————————————————-
About Vaginia station, Are you operating for almost, mainly a contest or normal QSO?
DX, I’ve been licensed since 1994. This is my 30th year as a ham radio operator. So, but yeah, I mainly go after DX.
Very good Stations, They have very good.
I always reach out, I always reach out to the JAs in Japan. I talk to my friend Masa a lot as a matter of fact, he and I um we talk, I watch for him to be spotted on DX summit and if I see him spotted, I’ll see if I, sometimes I can hear him. Sometimes I can’t.
And also the, the Vargina is not so good condition from Japan. And then the west side is not so hard, but the east side is very difficult to, to communicate.
That’s a very good station Keith-san have.
Ok, thank you very much.
Ok, nice to meet you too. Thank you.
